The Reading Stack for May 2024 📚
honest abe, a holocaust survivor, a hungarian novel, a buddhist collection
What Babies Can Teach Us (#1)
Human beings improve by going after what they want and incrementally noticing what works.
It sounds trivial. But is it?
Like a true son of the ‘west,’ I’m always setting my eyes on a target, usually far out of reach. But, often, it’s too early or I go about getting there incorrectly.
A baby lays on a mat.
She sees the edge of the mat and wants, terribly, to get there.
She wiggles and writhes. She turns, she wobbles, she flops onto her back.
She bridge-and-rolls back to her belly.
She picks up her head, looks around, begins testing her options.
Elbow? Foot? Knee?
She moves one inch laterally.
Knee!
That one inch of movement gained by lifting her knee, that one micro movement toward the edge of the mat, has hit the ignition in her brain. “That’s how I get there!” she thinks wordlessly, intuitively.
Five days later. She’s crawling.
The human brain learns by chasing what it wants.1
The Books 📚
Book #15 of 2024 - Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Let’s start with the cast of the audiobook: Nick Offerman, David Sedaris, George Saunders, Carrie Brownstein, Don Cheadle, Lena Dunham, Bill Hader, Keegan-Michael Key, Julianne Moore, Megan Mullally, Susan Sarandon, and Ben Stiller.
So how does one gather a Wes-Anderson level cast for an audiobook?
George Saunders is perhaps the most beloved modern writer of “high-literature.” Because of his combination of wit and hilarity, he’s compared to a modern day Kurt Vonnegut; I agree, but also see different influences in him like Steinbeck, Pynchon, and maybe Updike—and of course the the great Russian writers like Chekhov, Tolystoy, Gugol, with whom he is obsessed. His book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, is amazing and is a wholesale masterclass on craft focused around the great Russians. Saunders also has a hilarious and fun kids book called Fox 8 that I recommend. And I can’t write about the man without mentioning Tenth of December, his collection of short stories.
From Goodreads: February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, dying. From that kernel of historical truth, Saunders diverges into a story of loss that breaks free of its realism and moves into the supernatural. Willie Lincoln is stuck in a bizarre purgatory—called the bardo in the Tibetan tradition—where ghosts socialize, gripe, commiserate, and quarrel. And from there comes the struggle over Willie’s soul. quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.
Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer, this book is, at bottom, an exquisitely imaginative. Both the form and the story dare to be different and are proof of how fiction can point honestly and powerfully at some of life’s most troubling questions. Namely, how do we live and love when we know that everything we love must end?
Without a doubt worth a read / listen, especially if you love history.
Book #16 - The Gift by Dr. Edith Eger
If you have read and enjoyed Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, here is your follow up. Edith Eger—now 96 years old and still writing—struck up a mentorship with Frankl after the holocaust. Both survived Auschwitz and both were concerned with matters of mind, heart, and survival. To give you some scope, type her name into Google and Viktor Frankl, Anne Frank, and Carl Jung also appear; the book lived up to those comparisons. And I’ve heard her first book, The Choice, is even better.
In The Gift, Eger describes the worst imprisonment she has experienced: not Auschwitz, but her own mind. Each chapter describes one of twelve damaging inner narrative—such as fear, grief, anger, secrets, stress, guilt, shame, and avoidance—and the tools she has invented to deal with them. What I loved most, however, was the way Eger used her own story, and the lives of her patients, to accompany her teachings and bring them to life. Here’s a taste:
Empathic, insightful, and even quite funny, The Gift captures so many of the modern-challenges that most of us face—in much the same way Brené Brown might, for a corollary—and provides advice to heal and enjoy what we have.
I’d had this one saved for a while and I’m looking forward to reading more.
Book #17 - Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by Laszlo Kraznahorkai
I first heard about this Hungarian author while applying to grad schools. I asked someone for “deep cuts” and he mentioned Krasznahorkai’s collection of short stories, The World Goes On, which I skimmed through at the Brooklyn Public Library on a trip to NYC. I see what he means; reading Krasznahorkai is as disorienting as trying to pronounce his name. There will be sentences that emerge from nowhere and do not end for pages. Yes, pages. The man is clearly extremely intelligent and well-read, and isn’t particularly pompous about it. I actually wish he showed out that brain a little more on the page rather than meandering around; the meandering, however, turns turns out to be the point of the novel. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim is a sort of anti-novel. These authors are trolling their readers; subtly, without obvious flourishes of language, they point towards societal and person decay—and the decay of literature.
From Goodreads: Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor―a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town―offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
Laszlo Krasznahorkai is not for the faint of heart, and particularly not for people who don’t like authors who play with language, punctuation, and form. If you’ll forgive the cheap art comparison, he’s closer to Jackson Pollack than Thomas Cole. That said, it wasn’t unenjoyable. Just hard work. Good luck, should you take the leap.
Book #18 - Teachings of the Buddha - edited by Jack Kornfield
Because I refuse to give 7/10’s this a soft 8/10 Peppers. I enjoyed it, but there’s something about collections of Eastern wisdom that don’t feel quite as cohesive as when a single author writes the book start to finish. It’s almost as though we are dipping in and out of each monk’s brain too quickly. Sometimes I need the not-quote-worthy page to continue processing the wisdom-hammer they dropped on me a few minutes before. When it’s one gem after another, none of them seem quite as valuable.
From Goodreads: This treasury of essential Buddhist writings draws from the most popular Indian, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese sources. Among the selections are some of the earliest recorded sayings of the Buddha on the practice of freedom, passages from later Indian scriptures on the perfection of wisdom, verses from Tibetan masters on the enlightened mind, and songs in praise of meditation by Zen teachers. The book also includes traditional instruction on how to practice sitting meditation, cultivate calm awareness, and live with compassion. Jack Kornfield, one of the most respected American Buddhist teachers, has compiled these teachings to impart the essence and inspiration of Buddhism to readers of all spiritual traditions.
All that said, even though I found myself having to go backwards after mind wandering from time to time, I still quite enjoyed this book.
📚 Years ago,
In my early twenties I committed to a life of books, and that choice led me to view reading as a privilege and a practice. It occurred to me that no matter how much time I dedicate to reading, I won’t come close to getting through all the great writing out there. The realization freed me up to explore books of all kinds, not just the greats. Now, even as reading time grows more scarce, I pickup whatever sounds compelling, and write as much as I can manage.
Books are magic. Learning is magic. And my biggest wish is that you treat your mind with the books it deserves.
Cheers,
—J
And avoiding what it doesn’t….